Why do faith and reason work together

We do not need another external source in order to compare and bring together the truth as God has given it to us in his Word. Given these points, Oliphint concludes 1 that regenerate reason is to judge of the consistency of doctrine, 2 that reason is never to take a magisterial role with respect to theology, and 3 reason is to help articulate and organize our interpretations of Scripture.

This summary helps us to see that reason is necessary to a sound faith, but also that reason is flawed and marred by sin, whereas Scripture is not. Our faith then should be in the Word of God, while at the same time, using our reason aright. So maybe I misunderstood? Where faith comes in is the undertanding that the specific revelation of Scripture does not violate the law of contradiction. The key to interpreting Scripture, therefore, is in the acceptance by faith that the Scripture does not violate the law of contradiction, and when it appears to do so, it is only because my interpretation is flawed, and therefore I must seek another.

Leward, you are correct AND I am correct, which tests the concept of non-contradiction Turretin was trying to prevent someone from declaring certain doctrines to be considered as contradictions. Therefore, he concluded rightly that revelation, and not a human understanding of the law was ultimately authoritative.

Good stuff! Oliphint also has a good summary form of the book in his book booklet for the Christian Answer to Hard Question Series. There are times, admittedly few, when we must act on our beliefs passionately held but without sufficient supporting evidence.

These rare situations must be both momentous, once in a lifetime opportunities, and forced, such that the situation offers the agent only two options: to act or not to act on the belief.

Religious beliefs often take on both of these characteristics. Pascal had realized the forced aspect of Christian belief, regarding salvation: God would not save the disbeliever.

As a result, religion James claimed that a religious belief could be a genuine hypothesis for a person to adopt. James does, however, also give some evidential support for this choice to believe. We have faith in many things in life — in molecules, conversation of energy, democracy, and so forth — that are based on evidence of their usefulness for us. Nonetheless, James believed that while philosophers like Descartes and Clifford, not wanting to ever be dupes, focused primarily on the need to avoid error, even to the point of letting truth take its chance, he as an empiricist must hold that the pursuit of truth is paramount and the avoidance of error is secondary.

His position entailed that that dupery in the face of hope is better than dupery in the face of fear. In fact the interplay between faith and reason began to be cast, in many cases, simply as the conflict between science and religion. Not all scientific discoveries were used to invoke greater skepticism about the validity of religious claims, however. For example, in the late twentieth century some physicists endorsed what came to be called the anthropic principle.

The principle derives from the claim of some physicists that a number of factors in the early universe had to coordinate in a highly statistically improbable way to produce a universe capable of sustaining advanced life forms. Among the factors are the mass of the universe and the strengths of the four basic forces electromagnetism, gravitation, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. It is difficult to explain this fine tuning. Many who adhere to the anthropic principle, such as Holmes Rolston, John Leslie, and Stephen Hawking, argue that it demands some kind of extra-natural explanation.

However, one can hold the anthropic principle and still deny that it has religious implications. It is possible to argue that it indicates not a single creator creating a single universe, but indeed many universes, either contemporaneous with our own or in succession to it. The twentieth century witnessed numerous attempts to reconcile religious belief with new strands of philosophical thinking and with new theories in science. Many philosophers of religion in the twentieth century took up a new appreciation for the scope and power of religious language.

This was prompted to a large extent by the emphasis on conceptual clarity that dominated much Western philosophy, particularly early in the century.

This emphasis on conceptual clarity was evidenced especially in logical positivism. Ayer and Antony Flew, for example, argued that all metaphysical language fails to meet a standard of logical coherence and is thus meaningless. Metaphysical claims are not in principle falsifiable. As such, their claims are neither true nor false. They make no verifiable reference to the world. Religious language shares these characteristics with metaphysical language.

Flew emphasized that religious believers generally cannot even state the conditions under which they would give up their faith claims.

Since their claims then are unfalsifiable, they are not objects for rational determination. One response by compatibilists to these arguments of logical positivists was to claim that religious beliefs, though meaningless in the verificational sense, are nonetheless important in providing the believer with moral motivations and self-understanding. This is an anti-realist understanding of faith.

An example of this approach is found in R. It is up to each believer to decide when this occurs. To underscore this claim, Mitchell claimed that the rationality of religious beliefs ought to be determined not foundationally, as deductions from rational first principles, but collectively from the gathering of various types of evidence into a pattern.

Nonetheless, he realized that this accumulation of evidence, as the basis for a new kind of natural theology, might not be strong enough to counter the skeptic. In the spirit of Newman, Mitchell concluded by defending a highly refined cumulative probabilism in religious belief. Another reaction against logical positivism stemmed from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their language makes little sense to outsiders. Thus one has to share in their form of life in order to understand the way the various concepts function in their language games.

This demand to take on an internal perspective in order to assess religious beliefs commits Wittgenstein to a form of incompatibilism between faith and reason. Interpreters of Wittgenstein, like Norman Malcolm, claimed that although this entails that religious beliefs are essentially groundless, so are countless other everyday beliefs, such as in the permanence of our objects of perception, in the uniformity of nature, and even in our knowledge of our own intentions.

Experiences, thoughts—life can force this concept on us. Phillips also holds the view that religion has its own unique criteria for acceptable belief. John Hick , in Faith and Knowledge , modifies the Wittgensteinian idea of forms of life to analyze faith claims in a novel manner. Hick claimed that this could shed light upon the epistemological fides analysis of faith. From such an analysis follows the non-epistemological thinking fiducia that guides actual practice.

Hick argues instead for the importance of rational certainty in faith. He posits that there are as many types of grounds for rational certainty as there are kinds of objects of knowledge.

He claims that religious beliefs share several crucial features with any empirical claim: they are propositional; they are objects of assent; an agent can have dispositions to act upon them; and we feel convictions for them when they are challenged. Nonetheless, Hick realizes that there are important ways in which sense beliefs and religious beliefs are distinct: sense perception is coercive, while religious perception is not; sense perception is universal, while religious is not; and sense perception is highly coherent within space and time, while religious awareness among different individuals is not.

In fact, it may in fact be rational for a person who has not had experiences that compel belief to withhold belief in God. Although the person of faith may be unable to prove or explain this divine presence, his or her religious belief still acquire the status of knowledge similar to that of scientific and moral claims. It would at best only force a notional assent. Believers live by not by confirmed hypotheses, but by an intense, coercive, indubitable experience of the divine.

Sallie McFague , in Models of God , argues that religious thinking requires a rethinking of the ways in which religious language employs metaphor. Religious language is for the most part neither propositional nor assertoric.

Rather, it functions not to render strict definitions, but to give accounts. Moreover, no single metaphor can function as the sole way of expressing any aspect of a religious belief. Many Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians in the twentieth century responded to the criticisms of religious belief, leveled by atheistic existentialists, naturalists , and linguistic positivists, by forging a new understanding of Christian revelation.

Karl Barth, a Reformed Protestant, provided a startlingly new model of the relation between faith and reason. Barth argued instead that revelation is aimed at a believer who must receive it before it is a revelation. This means that one cannot understand a revelation without already, in a sense, believing it.

Revelation cannot be made true by anything else. This renders the belief in an important way immune from both critical rational scrutiny and the reach of arguments from analogy. Our selfhood stands in contradiction to the divine nature. This was a consistent conclusion of his dialectical method: the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a given theological point. Barth was thus an incompatibilist who held that the ground of faith lies beyond reason.

Yet he urged that a believer is nonetheless always to seek knowledge and that religious beliefs have marked consequences for daily life. It lies beyond proof or demonstration. Rahner held thus that previous religions embodied a various forms of knowledge of God and thus were lawful religions. But now God has revealed his fullness to humans through the Christian Incarnation and word.

This explicit self-realization is the culmination of the history of the previously anonymous Christianity. Christianity now understands itself as an absolute religion intended for all. This claim itself is basic for its understanding of itself.

Rahner thus emphasized the importance of culture as a medium in which religious faith becomes understood. He thus forged a new kind of compatibilism between faith and rationality. Paul Tillich , a German Protestant theologian, developed a highly original form of Christian apologetics. In his Systematic Theology , he laid out a original method, called correlation, that explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence.

Existential questions arise from our experiences of transitoriness, finitude, and the threat of nonbeing. Secular culture provides numerous media, such as poetry, drama, and novels, in which these questions are engendered. In turn, the Christian message provides unique answers to these questions that emerge from our human existence. Tillich realized that such an existentialist method — with its high degree of correlation between faith and everyday experience and thus between the human and the divine — would evoke protest from thinkers like Barth.

Steven Cahn approaches a Christian existentialism from less sociological and a more psychological angle than Tillich. One is always justified in entertaining either philosophical doubts concerning the logical possibility of such an experience or practical doubts as to whether the person has undergone it.

Moreover, these proofs, even if true, would furnish the believer with no moral code. Cahn concludes that one must undergo a self-validating experience personal experience in which one senses the presence of God. All moral imperatives derive from learning the will of God.

One may, however, join others in a communal effort to forge a moral code. The Darwinistic thinking of the nineteenth century continued to have a strong impact of philosophy of religion. Richard Dawkins in his Blind Watchmaker, uses the same theory of natural selection to construct an argument against the cogency of religious faith. He argues that the theory of evolution by gradual but cumulative natural selection is the only theory that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity in the world.

He admits that this organized complexity is highly improbable, yet the best explanation for it is still a Darwinian worldview. Dawkins even claims that Darwin effectively solved the mystery of our own existence. Since religions remain firm in their conviction that God guides all biological and human development, Dawkins concludes that religion and science are in fact doomed rivals.

They make incompatible claims. He resolves the conflict in favor of science. Contemporary philosophers of religion respond to the criticisms of naturalists, like Dawkins, from several angles. Alvin Plantinga thinks that natural selection demonstrates only the function of species survival, not the production of true beliefs in individuals.

Yet he rejects traditional Lockean evidentialism, the view that a belief needs adequate evidence as a criterion for its justification. But he refuses to furnish a fideist or existentialist condition for the truth of religious beliefs. P Alston and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Plantinga builds his Reformed epistemology by means of several criticisms of evidentialism. First, the standards of evidence in evidentialism are usually set too high.

Most of our reliable everyday beliefs are not subject to such strict standards. Second, the set of arguments that evidentialists attack is traditionally very narrow. Plantinga suggest that they tend to overlook much of what is internally available to the believer: important beliefs concerning beauty and physical attributes of creatures, play and enjoyment, morality, and the meaning of life.

Third, those who employ these epistemological criticisms often fail to realize that the criticisms themselves rest upon auxiliary assumptions that are not themselves epistemological, but rather theological, metaphysical, or ontological. Finally, and more importantly, not all beliefs are subject to such evidence.

Beliefs in memories or other minds, for example, generally appeal to something properly basic beyond the reach of evidence.

What is basic for a religious belief can be, for example, a profound personal religious experience. In short, being self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses is not a necessary condition of proper basicality. We argue to what is basic from below rather than from above. He concludes, though, that religious believers cannot be accused of shirking some fundamental epistemic duty by relying upon this basic form of evidence.

Epistemological views such as Plantinga develops entail that there is an important distinction between determining whether or not a religious belief is true de facto and whether or not one ought to hold or accept it de jure. On de jure grounds, for example, one can suggest that beliefs are irrational because they are produced either by a errant process or by an proper process aimed at the wrong aim or end.

Theism has been criticized on both of these grounds. But since Christianity purports to be true, the de jure considerations must reduce ultimately to de facto considerations.

Haldane criticizes the scientific critiques of religion on the grounds that they themselves make two unacknowledged assumptions about reality: the existence of regular patterns of interaction, and the reality of stable intelligences in humans.

These assumptions themselves cannot be proven by scientific inquiry. Thus it seems odd to oppose as rivals scientific and religious ways of thinking about reality. Science itself is faith-like in resting upon these assumptions; theology carries forward a scientific impulse in asking how the order of the world is possible. But what do we make of the fact that scientific models often explain the world better than religious claims?

What troubles Haldane is the explanatory reductionism physical sciences employ is often thought to be entailed by the ontological reduction it assumes. For example, the fact that one can give a complete description of human action and development on a biological level alone is often thought to mean that all action and development can be explained according to biological laws.

Haldane rejects this thesis, arguing that certain mental events might be ontologically reducible to physical events, but talk of physical events cannot be equally substituted for mental events in the order of explanation. Such argumentation reflects the general direction of the anomological monism proposed by Donald Davidson. Haldane concludes that language can be a unique source of explanatory potential for all human activity. Like Haldane, Nancey Murphy also holds for a new form of compatibilism between religion and science.

In Science and Theology she argues that the differences between scientific and theological methodologies are only of degree, not kind. She admits that scientific methodology has fundamentally changed the way we think about the world. Consequently, theology in the modern period has been preoccupied with the question of theological method.

But she thinks that theological method can develop to meet the same standard of criteria as scientific method has. Scientific thinking in the twentieth century in particular has been developing away from foundationalism: the derivation of theories from indubitable first principles. Willard van Orman Quine and others urged that scientific methodologists give up on foundationalism.

He claimed that knowledge is like a web or net of beliefs: some beliefs are simply more apt to be adopted or rejected in certain situations than others are. Murphy sees that theology, too, is developing away from the foundationalism that literal interpretations of Scripture used to provide. Now it tends to emphasize the importance of religious experience and the individual interpretation of beliefs.

But two problems await the move from theology away from foundationalism: subjectivism and circularity. The circularity emerges from the lack of any kind of external check on interpretation. Alasdair MacIntyre is concerned with the latter problem. He claims that evidence for belief requires a veridical experience for each subsequent belief that arises from it.

But Murphy finds this approach still close to foundationalism. Instead she develops two non-foundational criteria for the interpretation of a religious belief: that several related but differing experiences give rise to the belief, and that the belief have publicly observable consequences emanating from it.

The verification also requires what Murphy calls discernment. Discernment reveals analogous experiences and interpretations in other believers and a certain reliability in the actions done. It functions the same way that a theory of instrumentation does in science.

Discernment often takes place within a community of some sort. But are these beliefs, supported by this indirect verification and communal discernment, still in any sense falsifiable? Murphy notes that religious experience has clashed with authoritative theological doctrine numerous times.

Murphy claims, however, that until theology takes on the status as a kind of knowledge of a reality independent of the human subject it is unlikely that theology and science will have a fruitful dialogue. But she thinks that turning from the subjectivization of the liberal turn in theology to discourse about human religiosity will help this dialogue.

A strong critic of the negative impact of scientific naturalism on faith is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In modernity naturalism has led inexorably to secularization. In later phases it led to the transformation of cultural practices into forms that are neutral with regard to religious affiliation.

But secularization is not a prima facie problem for any religious believer, since it does not preclude the possibility of religious faith or practices per se.

Moreover, secularization has made possible the development of legal and governmental structures, such as human rights, better fit for pluralistic societies containing persons of a number of different religious faiths.

Thus it has made it easier for Christians to accept full rights for atheists or violators of the Christian moral code. Nonetheless, Taylor sees problems that secularism poses for the Christian faith. It can facilitate a marriage between the Christian faith and a particular form of culture. In contrast to naturalism, Taylor urges the adoption of a unique transcendental point of view.

Such a view does not equate a meaningful life with a full or good life. Instead, a transcendental view finds in suffering and death not only something that matters beyond life, but something from which life itself originally draws. This call of the transcendental requires, ultimately, a conversion or a change of identity. This is a transition from self-centeredness, a kind of natural state, to God-centeredness. Even unbelievers inconsistently rely upon Christian principles, such as logic, whenever they reason about anything.

So the Christian has a good reason for his or her faith. In fact, the Christian faith system makes reason possible. After the fall of Adam, human beings no longer possessed the ability to correctly understand spiritual matters 1 Corinthians It is our nature to distort the truth 2 Peter So we need the help of the Holy Spirit even to understand and accept the fact that Jesus is Lord 1 Corinthians It is ultimately the Holy Spirit who convinces people and enables them to receive Christ John — Why should we try to reason with people if it is the Holy Spirit who will ultimately convince them?

First, God tells us to. We are to be ready at all times to give a good reason for our faith 1 Peter So it is our duty as followers of Christ to preach the gospel 2 Timothy and reason with unbelievers Acts Second, God can bless our discussions with unbelievers and use them as part of the process by which He brings people to Himself Romans — Although salvation is accomplished by Christ alone, God has given us the privilege of telling others about this good news and making a reasoned defense of it.

Reasoning is a crucial part of defending the faith. But we must always keep in mind that conversion is up to God alone. One Christian may plant a seed, and another water it, but God alone brings the increase 1 Corinthians —7. Human life is sacred, from conception until the day we die. Feature articles explain when life truly begins, the shocking reality of human trafficking even in the West, and end-of-life decisions, such as living wills.

Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry , dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. Donate Now. View Cart. Faith vs. Reason by Dr. Audio Version. Share: Email Using: Gmail Yahoo! Many Christians would nod their head to that statement. These are two entities divorced from each other, one on either side. David Horner uses a metaphor in his wonderful book, Mind Your Faith.

Faith and reason are partners working together. Horner states that one of the biggest objections that the New Atheists have brought against religion is that religious people have blind faith.

They believe in things for which there is no evidence; ergo, the conflict between faith and reason. But Christians are people of reason and faith, but not people of blind faith.